Episode Report Card Jacob Clifton: A | 2 USERS: A+ YOU GRADE IT Sorta Damocles
By Jacob Clifton | Season 1 | Episode 7 | Aired on 08.24.2008
In a hurry? Read the recaplet for a nutshell description! Finished? Click here to close.Bravo enters Baghdad and set up an HQ in a cigarette factory, where Brad finds out that Kocher and his team are being demoted and censured for the Captain America situation last week. You know, when he went crazy that one time? And they pulled him off that Iraqi guy he was abusing, and then the random guy decided they were war criminals? So now he's fine, they're screwed -- and yet he still manages to present himself as this Rodney Dangerfield victim of chance and circumstance, such is the balls-out nature of his craziness.
Evan sees his first combat jack and runs in an evasive manner, Lilley's wife joins the Marines and Jacks's wife leaves him, but otherwise Baghdad is not that interesting. They're only patrolling once every three days for a while, but then the orders start changing every five seconds and not making sense. A team of the least appealing Bravo Marines, including Chaffin and Jacks, are stymied in their loot attempts, but luckily are able to use their Recon skills effectively, and destroy some random exec's office somewhere for no real reason other than they're gross.
All the men in Baghdad ask Ray and Doc Bryan for valium, treat children horribly, try to put up giant statues of Bush, and try to fuck Gabe. The moral of the story is, I think, Baghdad would be awesome without all the people in it. Luckily, we're there to kill them all. Nate at first gets pulled into humanitarian shit just like he always knew he would, and is of course deterred by Encino Man -- but the second Baghdad becomes one giant firefight, Encino Man orders Bravo Two on patrol despite having no idea what he's talking about. Nate says no, he isn't getting his men blown up for no reason in the middle of the night, and Encino Man is just like so offended.
Brad starts a campaign to blow up unexploded ordnance -- including a bomb in a garden where little kids play, okay -- and Nate stops him after the first one. Then Battalion orders Patterson to accompany some engineers to mark a mine field at night. Since there's no reason to do that whatsoever, unless you're trying to get people killed, Patterson tells Encino Man to go fuck himself. Hilariously, he immediately runs whining to Captain America and makes him do it instead. Long story short: two casualties, casevaced to nowhere, following a shortcut Cap made up.
Evan says goodbye to the boys -- including a Ripped Fuel-free Ray, who is quiet and even scarier than usual -- and gets some bullshit speech from Ferrando about how the best policy is to ignore all complaints about your men until such time as people die. Which is retarded, but not as retarded as the example he gives Evan, which is that Nate Fucking Fick of all people has a terrible track record, so you see how this makes logical sense. Evan is of course grossed out, and then even more grossed out when Ferrando starts talking about how he gets off on being shot at.
They play football in a soccer field, because what you need with real attack dog aggression is more, pretend aggression on top of it. Encino Man screams his idiot head off, because he thinks football is God, and generally acts like a prick until Patterson finally beats the shit out of him, awesomely. On an unrelated but nearly simultaneous note, Ray freaks out and gets his ass handed to him by Rudy, which hurts both their feelings.
Everybody says as many meaningful things about the war and being Marines as they can, in very somber voices. Normally I would say this is a screenwriting issue, but it comes off as powerfully real because if you've been watching at all, you know to what degree these guys are drama queens. I have to say, though, that the last scene of the series is completely awesome: Bravo Two, watching Lilley's footage while Johnny Cash plays, and one by one getting bored with it, until all that's left is Trombley, watching himself kill. Well done.
Want more? The full recap starts right below!Ray pisses in the dust while Brad and Nate and Gunny Wynn look out over the city. "Jesus Christ," Brad breathes. "That's a lot of city." Wynn says if they're not careful, they'll get lost in there. On Brad's Blue Force Tracker, Nate sees it in two dimensions: "Street after street, alley after alley. Look at it." And compared to those little kilometer long towns in their tracks, Wynn notes, it's a different world. There's Fedayeen sniping American units down in the city, as they watch. Nate points Brad to a specific neighborhood, a Shi'a slum called Saddam City. Wynn notes the need to rename that bitch, and they all smile. Everybody mounts up to head in, and Brad quietly signals Ray over to the truck. "Dude, check it out! I wrote USA with my piss!" So noted. Brad grins to himself.
Trombley's up top on the way in. Walt is driving, and Ray is asleep, having finally crashed. He spends this entire episode crashing and crashing, digging more places to crash underneath where he crashed, and then crashing again. Brad starts singing "King Of The Road," because that's how he's feeling: lofty and magnanimous. A man of means, by no means. Somebody calls for Eric Kocher over the radio, and receives the response that he is no longer on Three Two. Say again? "Be advised: the team leader's been fired. Over." For once, the radios are working, so Brad can't get more info. Ray wakes up and asks about Kocher. "He's not riding with Three Two," Brad says darkly. Ray shakes the sleep from his head: "...Were you guys singing 'King Of The Road' without me?"
The trucks head into a warehouse, where Marines are scattering bits of silver paper everywhere, in celebration. One man dances underneath them; somebody else asks him to show his tits. They're encamping in a cigarette factory. It's burning because the entire city is burning. "If these were Marlboros, we'd be fuckin' rich." Chaffin compares smoking "hajji cigarettes" to "eating raghead pussy," because he's really interesting as a person and has super high self-esteem. Ray points out they're standing in the biggest cloud of secondhand smoke possible ever: "They fuckin' execute people for shit like this in California," he says.
It would be a lot funnier if James Ransone hadn't once again decided against acting in this half of the episode. Hey, it's a choice. And frankly drugged into a coma he could still act circles around Jon Huertas, who manages to fuck up every scene he is in this episode twice as bad as usual, which is not even really his fault because of the Poke speeches being shoveled into his mouth at twice their normal rate by some kind of expert bullshit stevedores with zero sense of normal speech rhythms, who still think it's tearjerking shit when you spit it out as loudly and quickly as possible.
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